14 August 2007

Have I mentioned lately how hot it is?? So hot. Soooo hot. Too hot to do anything hot. Well, to do anything but make lots and lots of frozen goodies. I've come up with two more icy treats to tempt your tastebuds... Berry Sorbet and Daquari Ice Lime Sherbet. Take a moment, wipe your mouth, and print out these recipes to try:

07 August 2007

We have a semi-regular pizza night (semi, because in the summer it's usually too danged hot to cook), where I set out all kinds of colourful veggies and toppings and just let the kids go wild building the pizza of their dreams. Usually I have to yell at them to stop hogging up all the toppings, because they like to pile theirs somewhere in the 2-3 inch category, leaving cheese for the rest of us. Fortunately for me, mozzarella still does okay for me. Unfortunately for them... I want my stinkin' toppings!

Something I like to do, to make things easier, is to make pizza crusts in individual sizes and freeze them in a stack. Then I can just thaw out what I want, build my pizza, and pop it into the oven. If I'm feeling really rushed, I'll pull out a pre-built pizza and cook it from frozen. My recipes for pizza crust (BOTH normal GF pizza crusts and Better Batter Flour Pizza Crusts) and full techniques and instructions for making pizza and crusts ahead, with every variation you can think of is on my regular GF, sadly neglected, blog.

This particular night, I was also experiementing with RAW food, and I tried a dehydrated pizza recipe from one of my favorite raw foods cookbooks, the Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine Book.

Okay, Let me just say... this was possibly the worst pizza I've had in my life. Bad enough not to give you the recipe... The toppings were pretty good (I picked them off and ate them), but the crust was like a huge, thick slab of pesto-flavoured nut-butter. It was rough, I tell you. ROugh Rough. Make-something-else-to-eat rough.

There was a great looking recipe for mock fish stick, but of course, me being me, I couldn't leave it alone, and this is the result. Be warned: This recipe take a good bit of work, and a loooooong time to dehydrate, but I have to say, it was pretty good, even by the Carnivore's standards. Which means, he'd eat them.

They're also pretty cheap.

Don't be alarmed by the amount of cayenne pepper in the receipe. It's necessary in order for your mouth to perceive 'heat' but not "hot" in the OMG I've got to have a gallon of water NOW kinda way. Even the Carnivore, who hates spicy, didn't get overheated. But, erm... if you don't believe me, feel free to halve the amount.

Cut eggplant and zucchini lengthwise into fillets about 1/3 inch thickness and soak them for at least 24 hours.

Press excess water out with a paper towel.

IN the bowl of your food processor, combine eggplant with the onion and marinade ingredients and process till smooth.

Remove to a mixing bowl. IN the food processor, chop the zuchinni until it resembles fish flakes (slightly coarse but very small.)

Mix the ingredients the eggplant mixture and the zucchini. This is your "fish" mixture.

Cut each nori sheet into quarters. Fill the nori strip with about a Tbsp of the mixture, in a long strip. Roll the nori into a cigarette shape (it will be like a 4 inch long cigarillo, actually!), and gently press the sides down.

Place the fish cigarillos on food dehydrator sheets and dehydrate at 145 for 2 hours.

Remove from the dehydrator. Flatten gently with your fingers until the cigarillos turn into little rectangles that resemble....fish sticks!

In the bowl of your food processor, grind the Sunflower seeds and salt until smooth, adding water if necessary, to make a 'pancake batter' consistency.

Grind the flaxseed until it resembles a meal.

Dip the marinated, nori cigarillos in the batter and cover completely on both sides, then roll in the flaxseed, pressing to adhere.

Place on the dehydrator tray and dehydrate at 105 degrees for about 2 hours and then flip it over and dehydrate for another hour.

It's hot. It's too dang hot. It's too dang, dang hot to cook. So I made an ice cream we could eat for lunch. If you really wanted to round this out, you could slather this between two slices of GF bread and freeze, or if you wanted to be eeeeeeviilllllll you could make GF cookie bars and slap it between those, and freeze.

We just eat it in a bowl because, like I said... it's too dang hot.

This ice cream is (of course *eye roll*) dairy free, boys and girls, and tastes almost exactly like peanut butter and jelly (which is weird because there's not a peanut or grape in sight... didja know grapes give me migraines, too??). It's also raw (whaddayaknow!)

Optional: Keep 1 c of the berries reserved, blend into the agave nectar, and stir into the ice cream AFTER it's done, then let cure. Otherwise...

IN a blender, blend the cashew butter, brazil nuts, and blackberries till smooth. Stir in the agave nectar. Freeze per your manufacturers directions, or put in a bowl and stir every 10 minutes for 2 hours.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll get around to posting the huge array of recipes I promised, But first...

You're not going to believe how good this is, and how close it tastes to real tuna fish (can anyone out there remember real tuna fish?) I mean, even if you're not a vegetarian, the thought of all that mercury and overfishing... and the cost of 'safe' tuna? *shudders* Here's a tuna salad you'll love. Don't be weirded out by all the ingredients... they all combine to make the best mock tuna ever.

Mock Tuna Salad 1 Cup Almonds (with skins, soaked and air dried)1 Cup Raw Walnuts (soaked)1/4 fresh lemon (and I mean ALL parts)1/2 Tsp. Garlic (minced)1/2 sheet Nori (NOT toasted, obviously!lol)2 Tbs. GF Tamari or dark miso1/4-1/2 c water******************************* In FP blend seeds, nuts, garlic, nori & Tamari, until the mixture resembles very dry tuna fish (I use the pulse button about 12 times. It may take more). Remove 2/3 of it and transfer to bowl. Add the lemon and water to remaining 1/3 and process until it's very smooth. Mix this into the coarser mixture.

04 August 2007

A Raw, vegan Pizza recipe review. And the really good supreme pizza salad that came out of that disaster.

A nice pepper slaw

a recipe for Extreme PB&J (you'll have to wait and see what that one is)

Chips Ideas

I've decided to make several kinds of the same dish (regular vegetarian and raw vegan) at the same time, mostly to see if it can be done (to have similar tastes with different techniques), but also because I DEFINITELY cannot have dairy (MIGRAINES!!!) ugh...the mouring ove rthe lost cheese is unbelievable.

Granted, I can have mozarella...but might as well try new things, while I can, right?

I'm also trying a new, raw, vegan Fruity Pebbles recipe, and I'll let you knwo how it goes, once it's finished dehydrating.

Dunno how long I'll be in the mood to cook this much (raw food has crazy prep times attached, in general... like 4 hours for a single pizza, ugh)

I'd post tonight, but really.... I'm toast. Too much dehydrating and cooking for one day. Seriously.*kisses*

02 August 2007

I've been so fascinated by raw foods that I've decided that I'm going to 'go raw' at least one day a week, if for no other reason than to learn new 'un'cooking techniques.

This morning I started my day with a large, beautiful bowl of summer fruit salad and a large glass of nutmilk. Somewhere in the middle of the meal I decided to dip my plums into the vanilla nutmilk -- Holy Mother of Yum! Vanilla and Plums is a great combination.

On another note: Vanilla and Mangos...not so good. *shudders at the memory of curdled nutmilk*

For lunch we went to our usual Chinese restaurant, where I feasted on watermelon and Kimchi. For those of you who don't know, Kimchi is a fermented cabbage slaw with a lot of kick (from crushed red pepper and garlic).

Of course somewhere along the line something went terribly wrong...and I got glutened (suspecting hidden soy sauce?)...I dunno. When I make kimchi I don't use soy sauce, so... it's all speculation.

For Dinner I was really in the mood for some pasta. I've read over and over again that summer squash, zucchini, and young coconut are really great for pasta, so I took one of my handy-dandy summer squashes, peeled it and then used the peeler to shave linguini noodles from the squash. This yielded about a pound of 'pasta' -- I'd probably make twice as much in the future, because you get huuuuuuungry very quickly with this kind of food.

Now you might be wondering about the mint: It adds a complexity to the dish that is welcome and makes up for the subtle 'meat' flavour you'd expect from the sauce.

Now I had a great tasting 'Bolognase'... but it was ice cold.

This is where thinking outside the box paid off for me. The theory behind raw cooking is that you really don't want to cook anything over 110 degrees (120 degrees is the max). I figured that most people don't want truly 'hot' food -- they usually wait for it to come to a comfortable temperature. All I needed to do was to get this food to a comfortable (read: warm) temperature, and it would be golden!

To do this I set my oven to 110 degrees, made up my plates, and put them in the oven till the food was warm (this took me all of 7 minutes). Bam! Instant, palatable raw food.

Another trick: add some crushed red pepper instead of 'parm.' the heat of the pepper really does fool the mouth (in the aftertaste) into thinking it's had a 'hot' meal.

Of course when you're eating this way you can really afford to do the dessert thing, so I cranked out some sorbet made from fresh, wild Blackberries that my children picked.

To Make:1 quart fresh blackberries1 1/2 c agave nectar

Blend the agave nectar and blackberries. Sieve out the seeds. Freeze in your ice cream freezer or, alternatively, whisk every 15 minutes for 2-3 hours in a bowl. Cover with plastic wrap or some airtight seal and let 'cure' at least 3 hours.